Frankbryce

Until I read Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Revolution, I hadn't realized what the philosophy of Wikipedia was. It is very much aligned with my values, so here I am to learn and be a part of it.

Copied Notes From elsewhere in the wikipedia namespace

Featured Articles as a cure for edit creep

I personally think this is a really good idea. One aspect of Wikipedia that could be improved is the slow growth of FA articles. Over 15 years ago, Jimmy Wales wanted Wikipedia to get to 100k FA articles within 2 years (!). One of the reasons that this goal has failed, from my perspective, is that it requires a lot of hard work by folks that know a lot (or are willing to learn a lot) about a subject. That article claims 50 hours of editor time in order to make an FA article.

A problem that experts give in Wikipedia:Expert_retention is the constant editing of articles (be non-experts) that are _already_ good, which then _requires_ expertise to fix it again. FA article count growth cannot scale well if all FA articles require a constant amount of expert time just to keep it of the same quality. If this were the case, then as more FA articles come into existence, this actually will slow the rate of FA article count growth over time! Experts should spend the majority of time making new FA articles, not policing old ones. That's why I think automatically (partially) protecting Featured Articles is a good idea. Direct quote below.

An established process exists to nominate and approve an articles promotion to the status of ‘featured,’ also a similar process can be invoked to demote it. Featured should also automatically render the entry fully protected. At least until it falls back down to the lower level. Or alternatively semi-protection is another consideration.

Talk pages would still be open, of course, and should it be felt that some error, or important new information need to be inserted, it could be discussed first and when consensus had been reached any administrator could unprotect the article to permit changes to be made and lock it up again after. Should the contents need a more detailed reworking then a nomination to have it demoted would pass through existing channels. Thus this doesn't mean an article is declared "finished," only that an extra layer of oversight is added to prevent unilateral changes without broad support.

Editors would be encouraged by this policy to clean-up and nominate entries as they would know that there would be some stability obtained from their efforts. As it stands it’s just not worth the trouble as nothing is gained except exposing your work to more intense vandalism.